The Century Where Food Stopped Being About Food | Bobby Hicks Ep. 215

Chef's PSA Podcast · Jul 31, 2026 · 1h 12m

Bobby Hicks read roughly 800 mid-century cookbooks to write one, and what he found was not a list of bad recipes. It was the exact point where American home cooking lost its thread.

The Great Depression ran into World War II with almost no recovery in between. Two generations of mothers cooked without butter, without sugar, without the ingredients their own mothers' recipes assumed. What did not get cooked did not get taught. By the time the post-war boom arrived with canned soup and boxed everything, and women moved from house labor into factories and still had to put dinner on the table…